A loop-free induced subgraph game is a convex cooperative game if and only if every edge weight is nonnegative. Necessity follows by applying the supermodular inequality to and . Since both singleton values and the empty value are zero,
Conversely, direct cancellation of common edge contributions gives, for any coalitions ,
Every summand is nonnegative, proving that is a supermodular set function and hence convexity. Equivalently, a player's marginal contribution to is , which cannot decrease as grows. This establishes the convexity criterion for an induced subgraph game directly.[ref]